Microsoft Build 2025: The Rise of AI Agents and the Future of the Open Agentic Web

The dawn of the agentic internet is no longer a distant vision but an increasingly tangible reality, as demonstrated by Microsoft’s sweeping announcements at Build 2025. This year’s developer conference sets a clear course for the future of AI, showcasing a bold roadmap: from the reimagination of software development to the establishment of open standards that underpin the next era of web infrastructure. In the past year, an AI-driven sea change has accelerated within every corner of the Microsoft ecosystem, signaling both extraordinary possibilities and fresh challenges for individuals, developers, enterprises, and society at large.

The Rise of AI Agents: From Productivity Tools to Autonomous Problem-Solvers​

AI agents, equipped with significant advancements in reasoning, memory, and interaction capabilities, are rapidly evolving from basic digital assistants into sophisticated co-workers and orchestrators. As of Build 2025, Microsoft reports dramatic growth in adoption: 15 million developers leverage GitHub Copilot’s enhanced agent mode and code review features to streamline coding, checking, and troubleshooting workflows. Meanwhile, Microsoft 365 Copilot has found its way into hundreds of thousands of organizations, including a remarkable penetration into the Fortune 500, with over 230,000 organizations using Copilot Studio to create custom AI agents and automations. Microsoft’s statements are corroborated by industry surveys and market analysis, which consistently place Copilot at the forefront of generative AI tool adoption in enterprise settings.
Real-world examples also add credibility to these figures. Fujitsu and NTT Data’s use of Azure AI Foundry for smarter lead management and proposal generation, or Stanford Health Care deploying Microsoft’s healthcare agent orchestrator to assist with administrative burdens, illustrates AI agents’ growing utility in diverse, high-stakes contexts. These applications underscore a wider trend: AI is increasingly integral—not just as a background tool, but as a decision-making entity collaborating with human teams.

Developers at the Center: Tools That Transform Innovation​

For half a century, Microsoft’s influence among software developers has been unshakable. The company now aims to extend this legacy into the age of AI agents. At Build 2025, Microsoft demonstrated a comprehensive vision in which AI agents operate seamlessly across personal, team, organizational, and enterprise domains. This is more than an evolution of tools: it reflects a broader ambition to foster an “open agentic web,” built for, and increasingly by, AI agents themselves.

GitHub Copilot: From Coding Assistant to Asynchronous Agent​

Perhaps the most consequential update is to GitHub Copilot, which moves beyond its role as an in-line code suggestion engine. The new “asynchronous coding agent” is deeply integrated into the GitHub platform, designed to handle entire development workflows—writing, reviewing, deploying, and troubleshooting code—without requiring the developer’s direct real-time intervention. Key enhancements include:

• Prompt Management: Organize and reuse prompts for consistent agent behavior.
• Lightweight Evaluations: Assess agent output in real-time across varying scenarios.
• Enterprise Controls: Fine-grained permissions and governance to fit organizational needs.

Crucially, Microsoft is open-sourcing GitHub Copilot Chat for Visual Studio Code (VS Code), integrating AI-powered code assistance features directly into the world’s most popular development environment. This strategic move reinforces Microsoft’s unprecedented support for open, collaborative AI-powered software development.
Independent developer communities and open-source advocates have welcomed this direction, though some express caution around the long-term governance and equitable access to these technologies—even as open-sourcing guarantees transparency, it remains to be seen how the interplay between proprietary and open contributions will unfold.

Windows AI Foundry: Empowering AI Development on Every Machine​

Windows, still one of the world’s most widely used software platforms, is repositioned as a leading AI development environment. The newly introduced Windows AI Foundry presents a unified, reliable toolkit for managing the AI developer lifecycle across both training and inference phases. Its pillars include:

• Unified Model APIs for vision and language tasks
• Foundry Local, supporting the seamless integration of open-source large language models (LLMs)
• Proprietary Model Support, offering conversion, fine-tuning, and deployment flexibility across client and cloud

With AI workflows now a core part of application development, this approach aims to lower barriers for experimentation while maintaining a strong focus on interoperability and scalability.

Azure AI Foundry: A Growing Ecosystem for Agents and Models​

Azure’s AI Foundry platform has quickly become the backbone for enterprise AI agent development. This year, new features mark important milestones:

• Model Expansion: Integration of Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini models from xAI, with more than 1,900 models now available across the ecosystem.
• Model Leaderboard: Live rankings of top-performing AI models across use cases, enhancing discoverability for developers.
• Model Router: Dynamically assigns the optimal model for any given business or research scenario, promising better performance at reduced operational cost.

These additions offer unique advantages for both startups and large enterprises seeking increased productivity through secure, governed, and flexible deployment of AI agents.

Security, Trust, and Agent Governance: Avoiding Agent Sprawl and Blind Spots​

As the sophistication and scope of AI agents grow, so too do the risks. Microsoft is keenly aware of the challenges: from “agent sprawl” (the uncontrolled proliferation of independent agents) to the potential for costly errors or unintended behavior. Several measures aim to address these threats:

Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and Observability​

The introduction of Azure AI Foundry Agent Service brings a developer-focused SDK that enables the orchestration of multiple specialized agents for complex, multi-step business processes. This orchestration is coupled with tools like Semantic Kernel and AutoGen, and new support for Agent-to-Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP), fostering secure inter-agent communication.
Observability is critical for trust. Built-in metrics, quality and performance dashboards, and comprehensive cost and safety reporting are part of Azure AI Foundry Observability, giving organizations real-time visibility into their AI agents’ behavior and ensuring alignment with organizational risk parameters.

Microsoft Entra Agent ID: Identity, Compliance, and Accountability​

Launching in preview, Microsoft Entra Agent ID automatically assigns unique digital identities to agents built via Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. This feature allows enterprise security teams to manage and monitor agent access, reducing the risk of unauthorized actions and addressing regulatory needs. Integration with Microsoft Purview enables detailed data protection, compliance, and automated risk evaluation—further evidence of Microsoft’s intention to make governance a central pillar of the agentic web.

AI Customization and Orchestration: From Law Firms to Research Labs​

One of the standout features announced is Microsoft 365 Copilot Tuning. Clients can now customize Copilot agents with proprietary data, domain-specific workflows, and company processes, resulting in models that deliver context-sensitive and highly accurate outcomes within a secure boundary. For instance, a law firm can deploy an agent that drafts documents reflecting the firm’s expertise, knowledge base, and stylistic preferences—sharpening productivity while maintaining confidentiality and compliance.
Moreover, multi-agent orchestration is introduced in Copilot Studio. This enables coordinated task execution across multiple agents, allowing them to combine specialized skills for large-scale, multi-faceted projects—raising both the ceiling of what AI can achieve autonomously and the complexity of monitoring these systems for alignment.

Toward an Open Agentic Web: Protocols and Standards for the Next Internet​

Perhaps the most ambitious vision unveiled at Build 2025 is the move toward an “open agentic web.” This concept proposes a web where AI agents operate as first-class citizens—discovering, accessing, and interacting with resources, services, and content on behalf of users and organizations. Realizing this vision requires open, interoperable standards and shared infrastructure.

Model Context Protocol (MCP): Foundation for Secure Agent Interoperability​

Microsoft is rolling out comprehensive first-party support for MCP across platforms—GitHub, Copilot Studio, Dynamics 365, Azure AI Foundry, Semantic Kernel, and Windows 11. MCP’s purpose is to enable secure, permissioned, and trackable access to data and services for AI agents, regardless of origin or vendor. Notably:

• Updated Authorization Specification: Allows users to safely leverage familiar sign-in methods (e.g., OAuth) for granting agent access to services or data.
• MCP Server Registry: Promotes discoverability and standardization, providing public or private centralized repositories for agent-aware services.

Microsoft’s collaboration with GitHub on the MCP Steering Committee highlights their aim to foster secure, scalable adoption of this open protocol, with clear industry buy-in.

NLWeb: HTML for the Agentic Web​

Microsoft is launching NLWeb, described as “HTML for the Agentic Web.” This open project provides a standard mechanism for websites to offer conversational interfaces powered by the model of their choice and with direct access to site data. NLWeb endpoints double as MCP servers, ensuring content is discoverable and usable by AI agents as well as humans. If this vision takes root, it could fundamentally reshape the nature of online interaction, opening the door to richer, more semantically-aware agent-led engagements.

Accelerating Science with AI: The Microsoft Discovery Initiative​

Few sectors stand to benefit from AI agents as much as science and research. Microsoft’s new Discovery platform is positioned as an extensible foundation for transforming the end-to-end discovery process. Intended for researchers in disciplines ranging from pharmaceutical development to climate modeling, Discovery promises:

• Agentic Automation: Automating literature review, data collection, and hypothesis generation.
• Cross-Domain Collaboration: Agents that facilitate multi-disciplinary teamwork and cross-organizational data sharing.
• Accelerated Time-to-Market: Drastically shortening the product development cycle by handling routine, repetitive, or analytically complex tasks.

Veteran researchers and R&D leaders are cautiously optimistic, citing improvements in throughput and scale, though concerns remain regarding transparency, interpretability, and the potential for algorithmic bias in high-stakes scientific decision-making.

Critical Analysis: Opportunities, Strengths, and Risks of the Agentic Web​

Microsoft Build 2025 lays out an ambitious agent-first vision, buttressed by unparalleled investment in developer tools, open-source integration, and protocol-driven interoperability. However, this future brings with it notable strengths as well as complex challenges.

Notable Strengths​

• Developer-Centric Focus: By unifying SDKs, open-sourcing core tools (such as Copilot Chat for VS Code), and broadening model support, Microsoft empowers a new generation of developers to iterate, customize, and deploy AI agents at massive scale.
• Enterprise-Grade Security and Compliance: Entra Agent ID, Azure Observability, and Microsoft Purview integrations demonstrate a strong commitment to security, compliance, and risk mitigation—critical for sensitive or regulated industries.
• Open Standards: The adoption and championing of open protocols (MCP, NLWeb) position Microsoft as both innovator and custodian of the broader agentic ecosystem, reducing the risk of vendor lock-in and fostering cross-platform collaboration.
• Scientific Acceleration: With Discovery, Microsoft offers a compelling proving ground for AI-driven acceleration of research, potentially reshaping how scientific breakthroughs are achieved.

Key Risks and Unknowns​

• Agent Sprawl and Complexity: The proliferation of semi-independent agents—each with its own scope, permissions, and learning objectives—poses significant governance challenges. Even with new observability tools, detecting and controlling emergent agentic behavior remains an unsolved problem in AI safety and organizational IT management.
• Security Implications: As agents take on greater autonomy, the risk of accidental data leakage, malfeasance by compromised agents, or undermined enterprise safeguards is real. Effective implementation of Entra Agent ID and robust authorization protocols is non-negotiable.
• Open Standard Fragmentation: While Microsoft’s support of MCP and NLWeb is promising, the agentic web’s success hinges on broad, industry-wide adoption, including competitors and standards bodies. There is a historical precedent for both cooperation and fragmentation in such foundational efforts—watching how Google, Amazon, and the open-source community respond will be crucial.
• Algorithmic Transparency and Alignment: As agents conduct more mission-critical work, questions around explainability, bias mitigation, and auditability become ever more urgent. Microsoft’s dashboards and reporting tools are a strong start, but cultural, regulatory, and technical solutions must keep pace.
• Digital Divide and Access: The possibility of an agentic web raises new accessibility and equity questions. Open standards help, but expertise, computational resources, and integration challenges may widen gaps between large, well-funded organizations and smaller players or individuals.

Cautionary Perspective​

Many of Microsoft’s headline claims—for instance, the number of organizations adopting Copilot, or the broad impact of Grok 3 and model routers—can be verified against independent developer surveys and enterprise IT studies. However, some predictive statements about the agentic web’s ubiquity, or the generalized positive impact of highly-autonomous AI agents, should be treated with cautious optimism. The history of digital transformation is littered with both remarkable successes and sobering lessons.

Conclusion: A Defining Milestone for Windows, AI, and the Open Web​

Build 2025 marks a pivotal moment in Microsoft’s trajectory and, arguably, for the future of the internet itself. The shift from “AI as assistant” to “AI as agent” is poised to reshape how we build, interact, and innovate across digital and physical domains. With foundational commitments to openness, security, interoperability, and developer empowerment, Microsoft sets a benchmark for what responsible, scalable, and impactful AI can look like.
Yet, as always, the promise of a new digital architecture is inseparable from its practical realities. Harnessing the power of agentic AI requires careful navigation of risks, collaborative stewardship of standards, and a relentless focus on alignment with human values and organizational goals.
The next chapters in the story of AI agents, the open agentic web, and augmented discovery will not be written by Microsoft alone, but in partnership with an expanding global community. As tools mature and standards solidify, the agentic internet may soon become the backbone for innovation, collaboration, and scientific progress—if we choose to build it together, wisely, and transparently.

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Source: Microsoft Microsoft Build 2025: The age of AI agents and building the open agentic web - Source Asia